Chapter 370 — The Assessor's Ruling

CHAPTER 370

The Assessor's Ruling

“Smuggled!” Tao Heng shouted, breaking the hall’s silence.

Three hundred spectators turned toward him.

“That pill was smuggled in,” Tao Heng said. He stepped forward with a sleeve raised, pointing at furnace number nine. “Five clouds from a Golden Core cultivator in a flawed furnace? Impossible! He brought it in his sleeve! I demand that the result be voided and the candidate disqualified!”

“He accuses him of cheating!”

“Of course he cheated. How else?”

“Wait. What about the clouds? The clouds rose from the furnace.”

“Clouds can be borrowed. Everyone knows that.”

“Everyone doesn't know that.”

“…”

Shi Feng stood behind the iron with his black hand hanging at his side. He looked at Tao Heng for a moment, then at the jade dish with the pill in it, and did not say anything. He had expected this since the herb check. The only surprise was that it had taken so long.

“Examiner Tao,” Wen Lu said from the upper gallery. “Sit down.”

A woman had risen from the assessors' bench at the very top of the hall. She was perhaps fifty, small and plain, with her grey-streaked hair in a tight knot and a plain grey robe with silver thread worked into the hem. She leaned on the rail with both hands. Her patient expression made Tao Heng’s shouting seem even less convincing.

“Assessor Wen Lu!” someone whispered. “The senior assessor!”

“She's sat beside Examiner Tao every round.”

“She never sits in on a trial. Not once in thirty years.”

“Then why this one?”

“Quiet!”

Wen Lu came down the stairs without hurrying. The crowd made way. She crossed the stone floor, stopped in front of furnace number nine, and held out one hand.

“The furnace, please,” Assessor Wen Lu said.

No one in the hall had ever heard a Pavilion assessor ask permission for anything. A white-robed attendant brought a cloth. Wen Lu laid her palm on the iron and bent her head.

The crowd waited.

“Left shoulder,” Wen Lu said. “Hairline, six inches, old. It's been sealed over with a paste. Beeswax and lamp-black, to look like clean metal.” She scraped a fingernail along the shoulder, and a flake of black wax fell off. “Under heat, the wax melts and the crack shows. This is Pavilion stock. Lot nine, in the tower's own register.”

“It was a minor flaw,” Tao Heng said quickly. “A defect in manufacture. The candidate could have asked for a replacement.”

“He was offered one,” Wen Lu said. “At the fifteenth minute. For forty minutes of penalty.”

Tao Heng's mouth opened and closed.

“You told him the rule on penalties,” Wen Lu continued, “but not the rule on defects. A defect that was in the furnace before the draw is the tower's, replaced at no cost, on the examiner's order. I wrote that rule myself.” She turned the furnace a quarter turn. “And he declined, and asked you to enter his refusal in the record.”

“I did enter it,” Tao Heng insisted.

“I read it. It’s an excellent record,” Wen Lu replied. “Thirty-first minute: aged Dew Root, eighty-three years, replaced into candidate’s second box by Examiner Tao.” She looked up. “Eighty-three years, Examiner. In a replacement stock that, I believe, holds nothing older than ten.”

The hall sucked in a hundred breaths at once.

Up in the gallery, Sima Lan lifted her ledger and held it open to the page. She did not shout. She did not need to. She had written the minute, the herb and the examiner's name four times, in ink.

“He asked me to record it,” Tao Heng said. His voice had risen a half-step. “The candidate. He asked me to note the replacement. He knew.”

“He did,” Wen Lu said. “He knew, and he asked you to write it down, so that it would be there when someone came. Today, someone came.” She laid the furnace gently on its stand. “Examiner Tao Heng. You're relieved of this hall. Leave your seal on the table. The Pavilion will review your lots for the last three years.”

“Assessor, I serve—” Tao Heng began, reaching for his last defence.

“I know whom you serve,” Wen Lu said, without raising her voice, “and so does the Pavilion. It doesn't trade in that knowledge today. Go.”

Nobody said a name. Nobody in the hall wanted to be the one to say it. Tao Heng looked around the ring, and at three hundred spectators who carefully avoided meeting his eyes. He put his seal on the table. It made a small sound.

He left without looking at Shi Feng.

The doors closed behind him. The hall breathed out.

“Heaven has eyes,” someone whispered.

Then Master Ruan, who had not sat down in an hour, walked across the floor.

He stopped in front of furnace number nine. He was an old man in a crane-embroidered robe, and for a long moment he only looked at the burned hand. Then he put both his own hands together, pressed them against his chest, and bowed from the waist, so deeply that his beard brushed the stone.

His apprentice cried out in alarm at the bow.

“Quiet,” Master Ruan said, still bent. “Child. Candidate Shi. I have been refining for fifty years.” He straightened slowly. His eyes were wet. “I was wrong for about forty of them.”

“You made a two-cloud pill,” Shi Feng said.

“I made a two-cloud pill with every advantage in the world. You made five in a furnace that was trying to kill you,” Master Ruan said, shaking his head. “I said a man needs Spirit Sense to watch a pill through the wall. You watched yours with a burned hand. I called you a child. I said fossils. The waves behind push the waves ahead, and I stood on the sand and scolded the tide. I won't say it again. May I ask what the old method was?”

“A friend taught me,” Shi Feng said.

“A friend who is forty years out of date,” Master Ruan said, and for the first time he laughed. “Then I should like to meet him.”

“He’s not available,” Shi Feng replied, closing that subject.

“Of course. Of course,” Master Ruan said, accepting the refusal without pressing him.

Around them the hall began to roar. It started in the second tier and spread outward, a rolling wave of shouting and stamping, until the water clock rattled on its stand. The merchant's wife was weeping into a handkerchief. A boy was standing on a bench, screaming a number over and over.

“Five! Five! Five!”

Shi Feng pulled his black hand into his sleeve and thought, This is going to be expensive.